Around Andreas Bandak's Exemplary Life: Modelling Sainthood in Christian Syria

Abstract

Exemplarity is one of those startlingly interesting ideas that deserves to be up there with ‘power’ as a foundational concept for the social sciences. Exemplarity is memory, learning, and mimesis; it is self-recognition in the Other, and therefore key to theory of mind. One of the curious things about exemplarity is how pervasively we encounter it in its multiple, material, and ideational forms; as copies, repetitions, iterations, duplications, models, seriations, similes, icons—the list goes on. Examples (of some sort) can always be found.